Jim Watkins: Questions are swirling tonight around a pilot who flies out of Laguardia, JFK and Newark. At issue are some tall tails he told a magazine about his past. Monica Morales joins us now with more on this, Monica.

Monica Morales: Jim the story is baffling because the young man has very impressive credentials but according to a magazine report, it appears he made up a few more. We went out to Long Island to get the truth---separate fact from fiction.

24-year-old American Eagle pilot, Timothy Martins was profiled in the April edition of the Air Line Pilots Association Magazine, for industry insiders. A flattering piece---if it were true. It turns out a lot of what Martins is quoted as saying about his resume was, well, in the clouds.

While he does have the required FAA certification for his job as a first officer, in the article he says, quote, "I was furloughed after 8 months, so I joined the New Jersey Air National Guard." and flies F-16s.

While on his trail in Long Island I called the NJ Air National Guard. (Chyron graphic says "Voice of Yvonne Mays Spokesperson, NJ Air National Guard.)

"Martins never flew F-16s for you?""No.""You don't know who he is?"[Defiantly] "No.""So, basically what he was saying was a lie?""Yes."

Martins is quoted as saying he worked for the New York City Fire Department, saying "It's an easy second job to hold because I can work a flexible schedule that fits in with my flying." Not true. The FDNY spokesperson said, quote, "He's not a firefighter, he has never worked for this department." (Chyron graphic says "Frank Dwyer, FDNY Spokesperson")

In the movie Catch Me If You Can, Leonardo DiCaprio plays a con man posing as an pilot. In Martin's case, well, he appears to be a pilot posing as everything else.

His neighbor, who does not want to be identified, says it's sad.Q: "You don't believe that he could lie."A: "No. No, he's not that kind of person"

We tried to talk to Martins at his Suffolk County home today---three times. But his neighbor, who grew up with him, well, did come to his defense.

"He's always been there and everything, I mean, he's been a part of the Nesconset Fire Department like, I think since he was able to, and everything, like, he was, he came, when my son actually had a seizure."

He volunteered here at the Nesconset Fire Department for years and those that know him said that he was a fine firefighter. They don't understand why he would embellish an already impressive career.

"He has brother's still belongs to the department, one of them is going to be a captain here, in April, at this next installation. And, ah, the two of them were always fine firefighters."

And according to published reports, he has been grounded by American Airlines because of all this, the airline has not returned our calls. We have also left messages with the magazine reporter. A lot of the neighbors can't even believe that he would do something like this.

JW: So many people are saying he's a good guyMM: That's right.JW: Is there any chance that the magazine reporter got the facts wrong, making him look bad?MM: You know, it's a good question, Jim, and we did reach out to her, via email, so hopefully she'll reach back to us, But, you know, the bottom line is, if he did do this, why? What would be the motivation? Because he sounds like a great guy.JW: And there seems like there is such a good likelihood of getting caught. Because the information would be out there for everybody to see, and..MM: Everything is out there on the web, only a phone call away.

F/O Timothy Martins (American Eagle) personifies pilot professionalism and living by the ALPA Code of Ethics

Some men and women grace their world with a maturity uncommon for their age. One such is F/O Timothy Martins (American Eagle), a role model for the ALPA Code of Ethics.

“I met Tim 4 years ago on the Saab in DFW at Eagle,” says F/O Ray Nicoll (Delta). “He came to me fresh off IOE at the age of 21. When he came into the cockpit, he looked me straight in the eye and shook my hand as he introduced himself to me.”

The ALPA Code of Ethics declares, in part, that “[an airline pilot] will realize that he represents the airline to all who meet him, and will at all times keep his personal appearance and conduct above reproach.”

“His shoes were shined and his uniform and personal appearance were sharp,” Nicoll continues. “He looked like a real professional pilot. There was something about the way he carried himself that made him stand out from the other pilots.

“Tim is always at work early with a smile on his face,” Nicoll adds. “The way he looks through the paperwork and weather, you would think that he has been a pilot his whole life. He is a real treat to work with. Throughout the years that I’ve known him, he never ceases to amaze me.”

Falcons and Eagle(s)

Martins got an early start on his path to the cockpit.

“When I was 6 or 7 years old,” he recalls, “my family went on vacation. We flew from Islip to Miami on a B-727. I got to see the cockpit as we boarded, and I thought, ‘This looks pretty cool. This is what I want to do when I grow up.’”

At the age of 16, Martins started flying in September 2001—an inauspicious month, to be sure—as a freshman in the Dowling College School of Aviation, located at Brookhaven Airport on Long Island, N.Y. He graduated 3 years later, all of 19 years old, with a commercial certificate and multiengine, instrument, CFII, and single-engine sea ratings.

“I was in one of the last classes at Atlantic Coast Airlines,” Martins recalls, “but I was furloughed after 8 months, so I joined the New Jersey Air National Guard.” He flies F-16s as a member of the 177th Fighter Wing, which is based in Atlantic City, N.J.; F-15s might be next.

In August 2006, Martins joined EGL, flying as a Saab 340 copilot based at LAX. Since 2007, he’s flown Embraer 135/145s from New York’s JFK and LGA.

Community service and ALPA volunteerism

The ALPA Code of Ethics asserts that an airline pilot “will be a good citizen of his country, state, and community, taking an active part in their affairs….”

Martins lives up to that part of the Code in multiple ways.

In addition to flying for EGL, Martins, carrying on a family tradition, works as a firefighter and paramedic for New York City. “It’s an easy second job to hold,” he explains, “because I can work a flexible schedule that fits in with my flying.” Martins is a member of Ladder Company Two, located in midtown Manhattan.

“Tim is the type of guy who would give you the shirt off his back if you need it,” Nicoll points out. “He is always helping guys at work with things.”

In 2007, Martins took the ALPA training, hosted by the ExpressJet Master Executive Council in Houston, to become a volunteer serving in the Association’s Critical Incident Response Program (CIRP). He also is cross-trained in safety and accident investigation, having completed the ALPA Basic Safety School and the Accident Investigation Course.

With that background, he was well prepared to provide CIRP support for the ALPA accident investigators who participated in the field investigation of the Colgan Air Flight 3407 crash near Buffalo, N.Y., in February 2009. Martins spent 10 days at the Colgan field investigation.

Martins also provides CIRP support to EGL pilots when they encounter situations that might seem minor when compared to working on the field investigation of a major accident, but are stressful nonetheless—“a rough time at home, going through a divorce, experiencing smoke in the cockpit, stuff like that,” Martins explains. “I give ‘em a call and ask how they’re doing.”

As if his days aren’t full enough, Martins also volunteers in the food pantry at Holy Cross Catholic Church in Nesconset, N.Y., down the street from where he lives, and has helped build houses through the Habitat for Humanity program.

“I try to give back to my community,” he says. “It’s the way I was raised.”

A few years ago, during EGL’s big hiring push, Martins served as a volunteer in the EGL MEC’s new-hire mentor program. Some of the new hires he guided through their first year on the airline had as few as 500 hours total flight time, and were understandably overwhelmed by not only flying larger airplanes but also learning the myriad details—such as using the airline’s computerized bidding system—that more senior pilots had long since incorporated into their lives on the line.

Cockpit professional

Capt. Dave Michaud (EGL) describes Martins as “lots of fun to fly with—he’s very personable, but that doesn’t interfere with his professionalism. He’s not only flying the airplane, he’s having fun doing the job, and I think that takes a special talent. He has a great ability to get along with anyone—flight attendants, dispatchers, maintenance, everyone he comes into contact with.

“His knowledge of the airplane probably exceeds my own,” Michaud adds. “Tim does everything above and beyond the requirements of the job.

He does all the procedures by the book, following SOPS, and always uses the checklists. It makes it easier to do the job right, the way we’re supposed to do it.

“It’s the little things, like always saying, ‘My airplane’ or ‘your airplane’ when we transfer control, so there’s no doubt about who’s flying the airplane.”

“Tim, to me, shows the professionalism that every pilot should show,” Nicoll says. “He truly cares about his passengers and crew.” And that brings us back to the very first declaration in the ALPA Code of Ethics: “An Air Line Pilot will keep uppermost in his mind that the safety, comfort, and well-being of the passengers who entrust their lives to him are his first and greatest responsibility.”

This Page is an antiquarian - possibly outdated - usergenerated website brought to you by an archive. It was mirrored from Geocities in the end of october 2009. For any question on this page try to contact the respective author. For any question on the archive visit our main page:OoCities.com. To report any mal content send URL to oocities[at]gmail[dot]com

These are trying times for all of us. Many do not know if a friend or loved one is alive, injured, trapped or worse due to the devestation at Ground Zero. Here are some resources you can use to let people know you or a co-worker is okay, inquire as to the status of someone you know, or seek those you wish to find.

To have a missing loved one listed on this page or for corrections, please email wtc_tragedy2001@yahoo.com.

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Philadelphia -- To hear Bill Bresnahan tell it, he was a hero at ground zero.

When the jets plowed into the World Trade Center towers, the retired Philadelphia police officer sped from Chester County, near Philadelphia, to New York -- more than 120 miles -- in 55 minutes.

There, he pulled body parts from the rubble. He conferred with Father Mychal Judge, the beloved New York Fire Department chaplain. He roped himself to firefighters in a hunt for survivors.

Amid the chaos, Bresnahan saw a mob beating a Muslim hot dog vendor named Achmed. Bresnahan fended off the attackers, then converted the victim to Christianity, right there on the spot.

With tales such as these, Bresnahan has wowed audiences across the nation. Tearful churchgoers and students have opened their hearts -- and wallets.

Police in Illinois say that was the intention.

They say Bresnahan, 54, is no hero, but a man who went to "extreme lengths of deception" to wring emotion and money from his listeners.

In March, he was arrested in Decatur, Ill., and charged with theft by deception, a felony, after church appearances there netted him nearly $3,200. If convicted, Bresnahan would face up to three years in prison.

He was at ground zero

This much is true: Bresnahan was at ground zero. He is shown in photographs at the scene. He was treated at a hospital in Brooklyn, apparently for an injury suffered in the aftermath. And a $26.95 book he's hawking about his exploits, "9-11: Terror in America," has sold at least 7,800 copies so far.

Though Bresnahan wears a police badge in the disaster photos and at some presentations, he hasn't been an officer since 1976.

Since then, Bresnahan has said, he has invented a pair of fold-up cardboard binoculars, an ergonomic rocking chair and a pretzel- flavored hot dog.

His effort to market the binoculars and hot dog have spurred resentment and lawsuits among some backers.

And earlier this month, state officials charged Bresnahan with 94 violations of Pennsylvania's charity law.

In 1998, Bresnahan founded Rise and Shine Inc. in West Chester, Pa., as a Christian charity. A year later, he told the IRS it had ballooned to an operation donating $29 million worth of food, clothes and medical supplies around the world a year.

In January 2001, Bresnahan told a Chester County reporter that Rise and Shine had donated $5 million worth of medical supplies and toys to Albania and Montenegro. Two months later, in a deposition, he acknowledged that those goods had not been delivered.

Pennsylvania officials recently charged Bresnahan with violating state charity laws by using Rise and Shine to fuel for-profit enterprises. If convicted, he would face up to $94,000 in fines and an additional $3,000 for each month violations continued.

"These are very serious allegations," said Karl Emerson, director of the state's Bureau of Charitable Organizations.

The complaint says that Bresnahan in 1999 diverted $98,000 from the charity to one of his for-profit corporations.

Investigators allege Bresnahan took 18,000 pairs of shorts from the Pennsylvania United Medical Association, then transferred the clothes -- worth $270,000 -- to one of his for-profit corporations.

He also is accused of selling $88,000 worth of donated food, water, skin-care and other products, including some he received from the Newport Assembly of God in Western Pennsylvania.

That shocked Newport's pastor, Gary Bellis, who said in a statement that he'd found Bresnahan to be "a well-spoken and charismatic man."

Visited at home in West Chester, Bresnahan declined to be interviewed. His attorney did not return phone calls last week.

Unsubstantiated claims

The Sept. 11 book, as well as a 2001 deposition and three hours of videotaped speaking engagements obtained by The Inquirer, offer a window to Bresnahan's activities.

He claims to be the second-most-decorated member of the Philadelphia Police Department's SWAT team, saying he retired after 10 years with disabilities suffered on the job from being run over by a truck and thrown out a seventh-story window.

Bresnahan was an officer for seven years, from 1969 to 1976, but there are no records that could confirm his commendations, a police spokesman said.

In his book and in promotional biographies, Bresnahan claims to have been awarded the "President's National Leadership Award" and says he was appointed by President George W. Bush to represent Pennsylvania on the "President's Advisory Council for Businesses."

White House spokesman Scott Stanzel said that Bresnahan received neither honor.

Chaplain story

The chapter in "9-11: Terror in America" devoted to Bill Bresnahan describes an encounter with Father Judge in which the priest told a Bible-carrying Bresnahan that they needed to "split up" so they could offer "encouragement and prayer" to the most people.

"There's just us here," Judge is quoted as saying.

The book says Bresnahan reached ground zero after the second tower fell at 10:28 a.m. Judge died before the towers collapsed, so Bresnahan could not have met him then.

The Decatur police also disputed Bresnahan's arrival-time claim. He would have had to have driven faster than 125 mph to get from West Chester to New York in the 55 minutes he claimed.

Freelance writer David Bresnahan, who wrote the book with Bill Bresnahan, said he learned of the discrepancy involving the chaplain after submitting a draft of the book. CNN, which was planning to interview Bill Bresnahan, found the hole in his story. (David Bresnahan says the men are not related; Bill Bresnahan and the book describe them as cousins.)

In a letter to Decatur police, David Bresnahan wrote that he was told by Dwight Wallington, owner of book publisher Windsor House: "We figured out how to handle this. Bill is just going to say he met an angel. He had a vision."

Wallington denied that contention. He said it was too late to change the book, which had been printed by that time. "I was so frustrated about that I didn't know what to do," Wallington said in an interview.

There were fathers digging for their sons, sons for their fathers, brothers digging for brothers, and they were firefighters all, searching the overwhelming rubble of the World Trade Center, which held the bodies of as many as 350 of their brethren.

The heap of debris was nothing compared with the insurmountable grief that was settling yesterday on the members of the FDNY as thickly as the ashes on their helmets and turnout coats.

Entire rescue units and specialized squads, the second and third in command of the Fire Department, firefighters from houses across the city, and the FDNY's disaster response expert were among those lost in the first hour and 40 minutes after the terrorist attack.

Those dead or unaccounted for include heroes who had made daring rescues or had pulled people from other disasters, people with irreplaceable experience.

"They've destroyed the heart and soul of the department," said firefighter Kevin Svenning as he sifted through the debris.

For a department of 11,500 members, a department that turns out by the thousands when just one member dies in the line of duty, it is a sacrifice too large and terrible to comprehend.

Never in its storied history has it seen a catastrophe of this magnitude.

Keeping their hopes up

As is their way, they refused to give up hope, not speaking of their colleagues as dead.

"We have hundreds of guys missing," said Lt. Tom Fleming, squinting and swallowing his tears. "All you can do is pray."

Fire Commissioner Thomas von Essen, face flushed, appeared shell-shocked and cried often as he spoke softly of how "dozens and dozens of people were in the stairwells of both buildings when the towers collapsed."

Legendary figures in the FDNY are dead or among the missing. People like the Rev. Mychal Judge, a Franciscan priest and beloved Fire Department chaplain, who was giving last rites to a firefighter killed by a woman who fell from one of the towers. He was in turn killed by a large piece of debris from the tower's collapse.

Capt. Timothy Stackpole, who recovered after falling into a flaming Brooklyn basement that killed two colleagues three years ago, was lost, and Von Essen wept as he said, "I almost feel guilty about putting him back to work."

Daily News Hero of the Month Capt. Fred Ill, of Ladder 2 on W. 51st St., who had crawled under a Manhattan subway train to save Edgar Rivera, whose legs were severed, has not been found.

"His son, Fred Jr., just became a fireman, and he was down there searching," said Rivera, his voice choking. "He saw the twisted metal, and he said there are pockets. . . . They are keeping strong and keeping up hope."

Losses close to home

First Deputy Fire Commissioner William Feehan, a four-decade institution, and Chief of Department Peter Ganci, a personable, 30-year hands-on pro with a son on the job, were killed when one of the towers collapsed.

Chief Ray Downey, who had assisted in the Oklahoma City bombing and other terrorist and natural disasters, could not be found, despite the efforts of his son, Capt. Ray Downey.

Fire Chief John Viggiano searched for his two sons - one a firefighter and the other an Emergency Service cop.

"I lost six members of my company," said Lt. Tom Beirne of Ladder 132, who was searching at the scene, "and three of my brothers-in-law are in there. I'm retiring. . . . This is unimaginable."

The attack had come right as the firefighters changed shifts, so double the number jumped on trucks and engines to speed to the twin towers.

Messages for our heroes

At Ladder 24, Engine 1 on W. 31st St., the ladder truck parked outside was covered with gray ash, its windows broken, and papers and chunks of plaster were on top. The ladder was raised, with an American flag atop it, and neighbors had attached bouquets of flowers to the front fender. Messages were scrawled in the dust covering the truck - "God bless you" and "You're heroes."

The house lost Capt. Daniel Brethel, Lt. Andrew Desperito and Firefighter Michael Weinberg. "After the second collapse, we found them," said Fleming.

The firehouse is across from St. Francis of Assisi Church, where Judge was based. Firefighters brought his body back to the station, where Franciscans joined them in a farewell prayer for a man who was as big a symbol to them as the twin towers.

"It was terribly emotional," said Brother Edward Coughlin, his brown monk's robe standing out among the blue-clad firemen.

"We dug for hours, and we couldn't find anybody," said Firefighter Joe Boneillo of Ladder 24. His eyes glistened with tears, and he put his hand over his mouth as he added, "All we found were helmets."

At Rescue 4 in Queens, which lost two firemen in the Father's Day blaze, Lt. Tim Kelly said nine firefighters are missing from the unit.

At about noon yesterday, Kelly said he just got word that two of the men were accounted for. "I don't know what that means. I don't know if that means they were located or anything . . . "

All the families of the missing firefighters were brought to Fort Totten in Bayside, Queens, where they were receiving counseling.

Waiting for the worst

Rescue 5 in Staten Island - a borough where many cops and firefighters reside - likely lost as many as 12 firefighters. In a nearby church, people signed a condolence book.

"We've heard a lot of stories about people who got out with their lives," the Rev. Stephen Ryan said. "But we know that is soon going to change."

There is a structured protocol when a firefighter dies, the funeral is a pageant of tears and tradition, kilts and bagpipes and slowly rolling fire rigs used as caissons for the coffin.

But there is no ceremony for this tragedy.

"We will probably just bury them one by one as they are found and later have one big memorial service," said a department spokesman.

"We don't know how to recover," said Lt. Ed Brown. "We'll try to make it through, but we're writing the rules as we go along."

Friday, August 13, 2010

At 36, Howard Lutnick is the youngest chief executive of a major Wall Street firm. From his lofty perch on the 105th floor of New York's One World Trade Center, the managing general partner of Cantor Fitzgerald, L.P., can peer down on the lesser skyscrapers that house far bigger and better-known brokerages. Though it dominates the brokering of U.S. government bonds, Cantor is no Merrill Lynch or Morgan Stanley, Dean Witter Discover or Goldman, Sachs. But never mind; Lutnick has ambitions as towering as the aerie he occupies.

Cantor has come up as a niche player. In a single day, on average, $100 billion in U.S. government debt is traded through brokers like Cantor, which reigns supreme in brokering long bonds; 30-year maturities. It also is a major broker for other segments of the Treasury market. Not least, it supplies the Treasury bond pricing data that are the bread and butter of Dow Jones & Co.'s electronic information service.

Though the Cantor partnership's capital of $185 million is only a pittance compared with Morgan's $13 billion or Goldman's $5.8 billion or, soon, the $9 billion of Travelers' Salomon Smith Barney, Lutnick is expanding Cantor into a supermarket of wholesale brokerage services in all kinds of fixed-income paper, foreign exchange, derivatives, futures and interest rate swaps. And it is in equities with institutional sales and trading. Cantor already employs over 2,300 people; more than half of them at its New York headquarters, about 675 in London.

A nondescript man of average height with thinning black hair, Howard Lutnick has come a long way from the modest home on Long Island, where he grew up as one of three children of a college professor. With his 40th birthday still nearly four years away, Lutnick already boasts membership on the executive board of the Nasdaq stock market and sits on the board of managers of his alma mater, Haverford College. Lutnick, his lawyer wife and their 18-month-old son live in Manhattan's showy Trump Palace, where they are served by an English butler.

His social ambitions match his business ambitions. This summer the Lutnicks vacationed at the ritzy Grand Hôtel du Cap Ferrat on the French Riviera, in a $42,000-a-week villa.

His mentor

Lutnick bootstrapped himself from obscurity by being useful to now-legendary Wall Streeter B. Gerald Cantor. When Bernie Cantor died last summer, at 79, he was buried in the small Los Angeles cemetery in which Marilyn Monroe lies. His fortune was estimated at $500 million, and his art collection was world-famous for its hundreds of Rodin sculptures.

Cantor's was a classic rags-to-riches tale. As a poor teenager in the Bronx he hawked hot dogs at Yankee Stadium. He quit New York University to become a broker, served as a paratrooper during World War II and in 1945 founded his own securities firm in New York. But it was in Los Angeles, the entertainment capital of the world, that he made his mark, numbering Kirk Douglas and Zsa Zsa Gabor among the clients of his Cantor Fitzgerald & Co. (Fitzgerald, long gone, was an early associate.)

Long term wasn't Cantor's style. He kept moving around, looking for an edge. Arbitrage was his real love; small, quick profits with little or no risk. Cantor knew his way around the convoluted tax code, and his interpretation of its finer points made him a master of tax shelters, straddles and other such schemes. Besides collecting Rodins, Cantor collected politicians. He and his wife, Iris, were among those to rent a room for the night at the Clinton White House.

Many in the securities industry are like Bernie Cantor, prowling about for an edge, but Cantor broke from the pack of edge-seekers in 1972. The equities business was crowded, and, save for the Nifty Fifty, equities were drooping. The government bond market was less crowded and; handily; less tightly regulated.

Sensing opportunity, Cantor invested about $3 million in Telerate, an electronic data service that disseminated commercial paper interest-rate information. He also opened Cantor Fitzgerald Securities Corp., a wholesale broker-dealer of government securities now registered separately from his Cantor Fitzgerald & Co.

The way the government securities market had worked until that point was that wholesale brokers like Cantor arranged trades between primary dealers. The primary dealers dealt with retail customers; retail being in this case not the general public but big institutions, financial houses, large hedge funds and the like.

There are currently around 35 primary dealers, mostly huge firms like Salomon, Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers. Why do they need wholesale brokers? To cover their tracks. The lion's share of the volume in government securities comes from the primary dealers trading amongst themselves. If a primary dealer is liquidating a huge position, it doesn't want that fact known, lest others, smelling a huge sell order, try to crowd ahead of it. By going through a wholesale broker, the primary dealer expects anonymity.

Enter Cantor. As a wholesale broker, Bernie did what his rivals hadn't thought of: He made the market more efficient by putting the bids and offers from primary dealers on Telerate's screen network. This made the market more transparent but preserved anonymity.

Today there are plenty of other bond quot screens. But when Cantor first got into it, Telerate was an innovation. It filled a gap. Through the Telerate network of screens everyone could see; more or less in real time; what was going on in the Treasury market, though they couldn't see the names of the players. Cantor's timing was exquisite. Stocks were soon to turn dull, and they were to remain so for a decade. But as the federal deficit swelled, the government bond market boomed. Cantor moved in deeper, soon doing business directly with larger retail customers as well. He sold his controlling stake in Telerate for a huge profit in the early 1980s, but continued to milk it by charging it for the data Cantor supplied. Though the operation turned into a disaster for Dow Jones, it was one of the best things that ever happened to Cantor.

Bernie's boy

Into this lucrative setup stepped young Howard Lutnick in 1983. Whereas Bernie had dropped out of college, Lutnick had a degree in economics from prestigious Haverford. But just a bit underneath the patina the young man and the old man were much alike. Cantor liked the kid. When he was just 24, an age when many young people are still in graduate school, Lutnick was trading for some of Cantor's personal clients. That was in 1985.

That same year Cantor let Lutnick start the Investment Strategies Group division of Cantor Fitzgerald & Co. Cantor was moving further down the distribution chain in the Treasury market, now dealing directly with retail customers such as regional banks, medium-size businesses, wealthy individuals and others.

In December 1990, when Lutnick was only 29, Cantor named him his second-in-command and designated successor. "Bernie wouldn't hear a bad word about the kid," says an ex-Cantor executive. "If you presented him with evidence that Howard had crossed the line, he'd say, 'Don't worry. He's young. He'll learn.'"

If he himself had not been the victim, Bernie Cantor might well have admired the way Lutnick grabbed control of Cantor Fitzgerald as his mentor lay dying.

In 1990 Cantor, in his 70s, went on dialysis. By 1994 he had been declared legally blind. Lutnick convinced him to change the firm from a corporation into a partnership, to avoid double taxation. The deal closed in September 1992.

Cantor had started with a 73% stake, but he and his stylish wife, Iris, took out profits to finance their high living. (By the time Cantor died, he owned just 47%.) The partnership structure still gave him absolute power; though Bernie's days were numbered, Lutnick apparently was getting antsy. He made an ally of Stuart Fraser, Iris Cantor's nephew, naming him head of the firm's government securities brokerage. In 1995 Lutnick, Fraser and a third partner tried to buy out the Cantors, but Bernie was still able to say no.

But on Jan. 2, 1996, when Bernie Cantor had been put on life support, Lutnick made his move. He activated the five-member incapacity committee provided for in the partnership agreement. Three members voted to take the reins from Cantor's failing hands; Iris Cantor and the fifth member abstained. Howard Lutnick, though he held just 14% of the partnership, was now the boss.

Iris Cantor, newly in charge of the holding company through which Bernie owned his partnership units, was furious. Lutnick has claimed she wanted to sell the firm. Iris claimed that she merely wanted a say in operating it. In May 1996 they went to Chancery Court in Delaware to have it out. After two days they settled. Lutnick won: Iris Cantor would get a lot of money but have no voice in running the firm. When Bernie was buried two months later, Iris barred Lutnick from the cemetery.

A master of the universe

If Lutnick grieved, it wasn't for long. The weekend after his mentor's death, Lutnick and a crowd of guests celebrated his 35th birthday by gambling for charity at New York's Metropolitan Club.

Lutnick was by now; in novelist Tom Wolfe's felicitous phrase; a master of the universe.

What gives Lutnick and the firm clout in an investment world dominated by far bigger and more respected firms? Certainly not prestige. Its clout derives from its highly specialized position. This is a business in which margins are so thin that it takes real expertise to make money on them. Lutnick likes to refer to it as "getting between the wall and the wallpaper."

The wholesale market in government securities operates in price increments as small as 1/256 of a point, which translates to $39.06 on $1 million worth of bonds. In the retail market, increments typically are in 1/32 of a point, translating to $312.50 per million. Commissions? A primary dealer that trades through Cantor's wholesale government securities brokerage operation normally pays a commission of $30 per $1 million. The customers of Cantor's retail arm would pay a minimum commission on their trades of $39 per million. There's not a lot of paste between that wallpaper and that wall.

There is, however, a hell of a lot of wall and wallpaper. These tiny margins are worth pursuing because the market is so huge. In a market where $100 billion a day is traded, even $30 per $1 million comes to $3 million.

If you can wring a few extra pennies on a business in the billions, you've got real money. Think of it as highly sophisticated coin-clipping; a clip here, a clip there, often so tiny as to be unnoticed across trillions of coins.

Lutnick's critics say he has not always been scrupulous in getting between the wall and the wallpaper. Here's one episode about which Forbes has seen the relevant documents: In the late 1980s a U.S./German outfit, International Participation Corp., was running investment money for 6,000 European investors, mainly Germans. Indianapolis-based Vancorp Financial Services took on the management of $29 million of the capital. Vancorp opened an account at, among others, Cantor Fitzgerald & Co., trading mostly in Treasury bonds and over-the-counter options on Treasurys.

From late May to September 1989 the Cantor account lost $3.1 million and, elsewhere, futures accounts lost $1.1 million, yet Vancorp collected over $4 million in commissions and fees. When Vancorp returned the IPC funds to Germany that fall, only about $17 million of the $29 million was left.

So complex was the bookkeeping; and so convoluted the trail; that it took until May 1994 for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to file a complaint. In January 1997 Cantor agreed to pay a $500,000 fine to settle CFTC charges that it had assisted in fraud.

But the German investors are still suing Cantor Fitzgerald & Co. for fraud and asking for more than $7 million in damages, plus three times that in punitive damages. The case is scheduled to go to trial Nov. 18 in federal district court in Los Angeles.

Extracurricular gains?

Where was the alleged fraud? The suit alleges Cantor agreed to broker Vancorp's trades for $156.25 per $1 million face value of Treasury bonds but in most cases collected almost three times that. It also alleges that Cantor acted not as a broker but as a dealer, without disclosing it to the client. Cantor denies the charges.

Howard Lutnick personally executed Vancorp's orders. His trading was conducted through three inventories; H, W and L; the initials for Howard William Lutnick.

FORBES has reviewed trading records relevant to the case. On Aug. 4, 1989 for instance, Cantor made a $150,000 profit (before commission) on a trade involving $20 million of long bonds that it purchased from Vancorp on the same day. In a trade this size the straight brokerage commission due Cantor at the agreed-upon $156.25-per-million rate would have been just $3,125. Did Vancorp's customers get full value for their bonds?

FORBES examined hundreds of transactions in which securities were traded between Vancorp and Cantor Fitzgerald & Co.'s Investment Strategies Group, and between ISG and other entities, most typically Cantor Fitzgerald Securities' government securities brokerage. They involved some $4.75 billion worth of positions and included over 80% of Vancorp's trades with Cantor.

Cantor defends its outsized gains on these transactions as simple reward-for-risk. But in the transactions reviewed by FORBES Lutnick lost money only about one time in ten. Cantor's take from the trades we examined was around $2.8 million. Close to half of that was rung up in four house inventories, almost all of it by H, W and L. Lutnick has admitted to a 30%-to-40% interest in the trading profits of those inventories. The other $1.5 million or so was credited as gross commissions to the salesman who covered the Vancorp account. After the salesman took his cut of that $l.5 million, Lutnick got a big chunk of what was left over.

The Vancorp account yielded profits in other ways. Cantor collected over $1.2 million of net interest. There were foreign exchange consulting fees. Commissions were rung up when house inventories sold positions acquired from Vancorp. Getting between the wallpaper and the wall? Cantor seems to have made quite a bit of space for itself in these transactions.

There are many, many ways to play the Treasury bond market. Howard Lutnick was well-versed in "rolls." What are rolls? A roll trade takes place between the day the Treasury announces it will auction off a new issue of a government security and the day the auction occurs.

Bond traders thrive on playing the spreads between existing securities of comparable yield and maturity and the forthcoming issues. Lutnick needed to figure out how to use Cantor's edge. According to a number of ex-Cantorites, for a time Lutnick and his Investment Strategies Group traders had access to the internal screens that the wholesale brokers used in Cantor's government securities brokerage rooms. At the bottom of those screens is a data crawl known as a waterfall that shows, by account number, which customers have been the buyers and sellers in the last few trades in a given security.

The brokers use the waterfall to keep track of the order flow. But knowing who is doing the trading is a clue to how big or well-informed the buying may be. Is it a primary dealer like Lehman? Is it a smart hedge fund like George Soros' Quantum? Or just a large company investing surplus cash? The customers are not supposed to have this information.

Cantor denies that the traders in Investment Strategies Group ever had access to the waterfall, but that is flatly contradicted by several former Cantorites. James Avena is now the president of New York-based Tullett & Tokyo Securities, but from 1982 to 1990 he ran Cantor Fitzgerald Securities. Avena says he told Bernie Cantor that Lutnick and his crew were peeking at the waterfall while trading. Cantor put a stop to it, Avena says.

First Nevada first

Howard Lutnick kept looking for other ways to leverage the franchise. In the late 1980s Bernie Cantor did not want to use his firm's scarce capital for trading, but he was willing to let Lutnick trade on his own. So Lutnick set up Solomon Partners, a private trading partnership named for his father. It was open from 1988 to 1990. He must have done well, because Cantor soon wanted a bigger piece of the action. In 1990 Lutnick created a better-capitalized private partnership, First Nevada Associates, with most of the capital coming from Bernie Cantor.

Though in theory First Nevada was a separate entity, it functioned like a house inventory for Cantor Fitzgerald & Co.'s Investment Strategies Group. When it was inconvenient for Cantor Fitzgerald to carry a position on Cantor's books, it might be carried on First Nevada's. Or First Nevada might be used to process a transaction or book a profit. First Nevada was active from October 1990 through December 1992. Between its founding and mid-March 1992, the account generated over 1,000 pages of transactions, nearly all of them in U.S. government securities.

Was First Nevada a sham account, a way for the house at times to covertly trade for itself against customers? Cantor Fitzgerald has always maintained that First Nevada was an independent customer of the firm. Yet several times in January and February 1992 First Nevada's profit-and-loss position was noted in the margin of Cantor Fitzgerald & Co. blotters exactly the same way that such notations were regularly made for the house's alphabetical inventories. On many days First Nevada's trading easily made it Investment Strategies Group's biggest customer.

On Mar. 11, 1992 the Wall Street Journal broke the story that the Securities & Exchange Commission was investigating Cantor. A month earlier the brokerage statement covering First Nevada's trading was a record 191 pages long. The day after the story broke, First Nevada abruptly stopped trading on margin. Over the rest of 1992 the account was wound down.

In 1994 the SEC made Cantor Fitzgerald & Co. cough up $90,000 in profits and interest and fined it $100,000 for poor record-keeping in connection with a complex scheme to accumulate risk-free positions at Treasury bond auctions.

Gary Lutnick, 32, Howard's younger brother, joined the firm in 1991. He has run the trading team of Cantor's Global Trading Strategies group, the renamed Investment Strategies Group. According to people who worked with him over the years, Gary developed a clever way of squeezing a bit extra for the franchise. A retail customer would make an offer to buy long bonds. If there was a flurry of buying in the bond, Gary would sometimes grab bonds on the screen in front of the customer and then sell the customer his newly purchased bonds at a slightly higher price; again getting between the wall and the wallpaper. He could do that because customers see the trading screen, but don't see who bought the bonds ahead of them.

Anxious to dispel rumors that Cantor's government securities brokerage was giving Gary Lutnick better execution for his trading than it gave to its other wholesale customers, the firm this year hired Richard Breeden, a former chairman of the SEC, to investigate. Breeden told FORBES that the electronic trade-matching system Cantor installed in its government securities brokerage rooms last year made the possibility of such preferential treatment remote.

But Breeden admits his inquiry was "fairly narrowly focused." He says: "We came in and looked at the way things run today. We did not go back and look at the last two years, five years, ten years, to inquire."

All that Breeden's "fairly narrowly focused" probing proves is that nothing fishy was going on while he was looking. A half-dozen former staffers of Cantor's renamed Global Trading Strategies Group have told Forbes that over the years the firm frequently traded ahead of its retail customers.

A Japanese bank gets a hosing

Howard Lutnick's efforts to win respect for Cantor Fitzgerald keep hitting the wall. In early 1996 there was the case of Cantor and Tokyo-based Norinchukin Bank, Japan's leading financial institution for agricultural cooperatives. The Japanese bank took a real hosing on some overnight orders it left with Cantor to fill. Did Gary Lutnick wield the hose? Sources tell us he did.

In its trading of U.S. Treasurys, Norinchukin favored what is called a scale trade. This means you buy a bit at a time, hoping that the market will be temporarily weak and let you lower your average cost. You can do this by putting in an overnight buy order on a descending scale. That can be dangerous on a volatile day.

Apr. 5, 1996 was such a day. It was Good Friday, when the market was open only half a day, and unemployment numbers were due out that morning. As it turned out, unemployment had dropped, which was bad for bonds. The long bond slumped sharply, losing around two points.

Gary Lutnick, our source says, had an order to buy nearly $1 billion worth of long bonds for Norinchukin on scale-down. Instead of filling the order as the price fell, the source says, Gary waited until the bond had dropped considerably, then bought bonds and sold them to Norinchukin at the higher prices specified in the scale order. Our source says he made the house roughly $800,000 in a matter of hours.

The Norinchukin Bank won't say much about the April 5th episode, but in mid-1996 it quit trading Treasurys in limit orders; and sharply cut back its business with Cantor.

Cantor Fitzgerald won't comment on the Norinchukin trading, but it did provide Forbes with a copy of an interoffice memo on its trade execution policy for customer level/limit orders. It was dated May 9, 1996, just a month after the alleged Good Friday incident. Personnel of the then Investment Strategies Group were instructed to explain the policy to their customers.

In the letter, after the usual boilerplate Cantor clearly warned: ". . . while holding your unexecuted order, we may trade for our own account at prices that are equal to, or better than, your level/limit." Isn't that a frank admission that it reserved the right to front-run customers? Front-running is of course illegal in stocks: In Treasury bonds it's a gray area.

Has Cantor Fitzgerald cleaned up its act, as Richard Breeden's findings would suggest? In a June 24, 1997 letter to FORBES, Cantor said that its policies and procedures forbid brokers in its government securities brokerage to take positions. Yet on June 6 of this year, according to sources, Timothy Coughlin, a star Cantor broker of ten-year notes, took a large position on which Cantor wound up losing an estimated $1.5 million.

We could go on and on with examples of transgressions and alleged transgressions we have uncovered in more than a year of research on Cantor Fitzgerald.

Since Lutnick took over Cantor's daily management in 1991, its revenues have tripled, to nearly $600 million last year, due in part to all the new businesses he's gone into. Keep this in mind, however: The growth was financed from profits from government bond brokerage, the equities business and income received from the sale of pricing data (a revenue flow the firm shares with an outfit now controlled by Iris Cantor). Many of those new businesses lose money or don't make much. European operations, led by the huge London office, gush red ink.

In short, Lutnick has yet to prove that he can turn Bernie Cantor's specialized money machine into a profitable full-service Wall Street house.

Skating on thin equity

Net profits rose during Lutnick's first years in charge, but from 1994 to 1996 they dropped from around $80 million to under $60 million. This year so far has seen another drop in profits, in part because of Lutnick's breakneck expansion.

Howard Lutnick's ambitions are huge but thinly capitalized. As of Mar. 27, 1997, there were $7.9 billion of assets but only $185 million of partners' capital.

The equity base looks even thinner when you realize that much of it is borrowed money. Last year the partnership retired a big chunk of Iris Cantor's partnership units and then it reoffered units to Lutnick and other partners; Lutnick's share is now 25%. Financing for the deal was provided by a Chase Manhattan-led syndicate. Thus Lutnick's partnership units; as well as those belonging to many other partners; are pledged as security for the loan.

Just as we were preparing to go to press, after months of reporting on the story, we received a press release from Cantor Fitzgerald. It announced the firm was, among other changes, shutting its fixed-income trading unit, Global Trading Strategies, Howard Lutnick's old stamping ground and more recently Gary Lutnick's. The announcement said the firm would concentrate on executing trades for customers. We note the irony without comment.